Over the next few days I thought I’d post some spreads from ‘The Dale Readers, Second Primer.’ This book was written by Nellie Dale and illustrated by Walter Crane, and was first published in 1899 by JM Dent & Co, along with the ‘First Primer,’ under the title ‘The Walter Crane Readers,’ Nellie later took the books to a different publisher and retitled them as her own.Here’s the title page, which shows some small children being helped up the symbolic staircase towards reading competency. You can probably tell it’s not in good condition - it's been drawn on and it's very grubby - but perhaps that’s because it has actually helped alot of small children up the symbolic staircase to reading competency, taught, as it happens, by my grandmother, whose shelf this was originally on.
2 comments:
Thanks very much for posting these images. Do you happen to have this book in its entirety (in particular, the Second Primer, or any/all of the other associated books by Nellie Dale)? The copyright is expired and I can find it nowhere else on the web. If you have the entirety in digital media (as you clearly do with the pages you posted), would you be so good as to post a zip file containing jpg files of each page in the entire book? Or maybe a jpg file of each page? Or a pdf? Or maybe a pointer to where you got your images (maybe the complete book is at the same place). Your comments seem to imply that you don't have the hardcopy book ("In the top right hand corner is a pale stamp which, when put into extreme contrast in Photoshop, reveals the legend: ‘Edmonton, Silver Street Infants School.’"), but that you do have a digital copy from which you chose to post image files of 4 pages. I'd really like to have the whole book, but I've searched the web for more than an hour to no avail. Google Books has one of these books, but not all of them, and not the Second Primer which is the one I'm primarily interested in. If you have this book, but would rather not post it for reasons of blogspot bandwidth usage or something, I'd be happy to give you my email address if you'd email it to me. But I'd rather not post my email address publicly in a comment so as to avoid the inevitable and concomitant spam resulting from same. Thanks in advance. J.
Hi J. If you click on 'View my complete profile' in the side bar you can find the link to email me with your details.
I've got the book - the proper one made of paper, rather than pixels. It's not exactly in tiptop condition either, as it was actually used in a school by grubby children. I only scanned four pages as I didn't want to bore people with the rest. I can scan the others if you want them but it may take a while as I'm fairly busy. Email me and let me know what kind of a hurry you're in.
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